Engineering Manager and Evangelist

Newsbrew is now a Google Application

I wrote a news aggregator a couple of years ago called Newsbrew which I primarily used for my own news-reading needs. I think I took it down when I got tired of paying for the server, and worrying about keeping it up.

After Google launched the Google App Engine, I decided to take a little break from Flex and AIR and rewrite Newsbrew in Python to get a good feel for the GAE experience. You can see the current beta version here.

Overall, I was very pleased GAE. It took me about five days to write this version of Newsbrew, but that included learning Python, Django, and everything about GAE. The application is fairly comprehensive, consisting of a user interface, aggregation service, and a secure administrator section. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to all the features and bug fixes that I wanted, but the app still seems to work reasonably well.

It’s still going to be a little while before we’re writing real-world production apps on GAE as it still has several rough patches, bugs, and missing functionality. But it’s very clear where Google is going with this, and there’s no doubt that GAE is a very powerful concept and platform. I’m certainly going to keep my eye on GAE, and use it as much as I can.